A torrent of words

HE wrote his first book review for the New Republic in 1934, when he was 19, and his last for the New York Review of Books in 1998, weeks before his death at 83. In those 64 years, if you were to reduce magazine format to newspaper column inches, Alfred Kazin produced -- what: a mile of criticism? Two miles? Three? This doesn’t take account of his dozen or so books, among them such celebrated works of American literary history as “On Native Grounds” and several outstanding memoirs, including “A Walker in the City.”

By any measure a long and seemingly a glory road, from the Brownsville tenement where he grew up in a Jewish immigrant family to an honored and rewarded position as a leading intellectual and critic. Yet a road beset by self-doubt, erotic maelstroms, unclubbable angers and a hunger for success -- achieved but blighted in later years by a conviction of failure. All this was patrolled by a lifelong liberal decency -- a sheepdog nipping at the heels of its obstreperous sheep. As a 1930s leftist, Kazin sat in the Trotskyist alcove at City College of New York, at war with the adjacent Communist alcove. He read James Joyce during the speeches, though, uneasy with his fellow leftists’ intolerance, and neither joined nor forgave their old-age swing to the intolerant right (think Norman Podhoretz, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol).

Kazin’s biography by Richard M. Cook, who teaches American literature at the University of Missouri, lays out the complications of this genial, acerbic figure. He makes much use of Kazin’s journals -- a good thing, though it has drawbacks. The journals, particularly the earlier ones, explore their author’s arrogance and scruples, advances and retreats, to the point where they blur rather than illuminate his character. At times, too, Cook’s prose is both stiff and cloudy -- a contrast with the quoted passages exhibiting the poetic bite of Kazin’s own writing. His friend Philip Roth praised a literary criticism “which read like a passionate communication intended for intelligent, living human beings rather than like a 1940s academic exercise or a 1930s political tract.”

Indeed, the strength of Kazin’s writing was its personal thrust; he encountered books as if to battle out of them either exhilaration or loathing. Such a style was one reason that, despite his eminence, he failed to get a permanent academic post until late in life. One department head complained that Kazin practiced “reviewmanship” -- a flashing display, that is, in place of academic groundwork. Kazin himself recognized a limitation; part in awe and part in discouragement, he wrote of hearing the academically formidable Harold Bloom discuss Yeats in a way that managed to get the ground to soar. One of the qualities that Professor Cook brings out, appealingly, is his subject’s mix of brashness and humility.

It was brashness that got Kazin his youthful start. Reading an essay in the New York Times on youth and the Depression while riding to City College on the subway, he was moved to get off at Times Square and march in to argue with its author, the Times’ daily book reviewer John Chamberlain. Chamberlain soon gave him an introduction to Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic, saying that here was an impassioned young man he could use. (Cook tells the gist of the story; he omits the bit about the subway, later noting that Kazin, who wrote about it in “Starting Out in the Thirties,” sometimes stretched details.)

A first review followed and, within a year or so, a string of reviews, there and in the Times and the New York Herald Tribune. This gave Kazin entree into New York’s intellectual circles, an entree notably enlarged when, at 27, he became the New Republic’s literary editor. “On Native Grounds” (1942) turned him from star to superstar. Starting with William Dean Howells and ending with William Faulkner, it examined 60 years of American literature through the lens of a fluctuating belief in national progress. Optimistic, even inspirational, it was widely praised, though the Left found it jingoist and the New Critics found it too little concerned with formal values.

Cook is best at tracing Kazin’s growing use of his Jewishness in his books. If “Native Grounds” brings the Brownsville boy into America, “A Walker in the City” and its sequels bring America to Brownsville. There are details of honors, lectureships, awards. Kazin won four Guggenheims, became a cultural ambassador, had lunch with President Kennedy -- all of which he enjoyed. There are also grisly tales of three awful marriages and numerous affairs, many adulterous, ending, according to Cook, with a last, happy marriage to Judith Dunford.

Kazin had little sympathy for modernist and postmodernist writing. The youth revolt of the ‘60s disturbed him, but (and here he emerges at his finest) he condemned the refusal of his formerly radical, latterly right-wing contemporaries to try to understand it. His difficult but loving relations with his New Left activist son, Michael, deepened his empathies, producing what may be the best thing ever said of neoconservative, New Criterion, bomb-them-back-into-the-womb certainties: “Were there not more important things than being right?”